It’s hard to beat this premise: A pirate captain kidnaps a renowned chef and tells him that his life hangs on whether he can produce a private dinner every Sunday worthy of his talents. Throw in that the pirate is a woman who earns her sailors’ adoration by her fairness, strategic gifts, and success at pillage, and you’ve got a delicious literary confection in the making.

The year is 1819, and Owen Wedgwood serves Lord Ramsey, director of the Pendleton Trading Company, as personal chef. His lordship has brought Wedgwood to cater a weekend party of company officials at the seaside town of Eastbourne. But Mad Hannah Mabbot crashes the dinner, kills Ramsey and others, and brings the cook back to her ship, Flying Rose. Shocked by the wanton bloodshed and outraged at having to feed a murdering villain to save his life, Wedgwood plots his escape, even as he bends his skills to play culinary Scheherazade.

For the story to work, Mabbot must succumb to Wedgwood’s galley magic, which makes her a woman of taste and refinement, of a higher sensibility than your garden-variety buccaneer. Conversely, Wedgwood has to be charmed despite her crimes, her constant insults, and her most un-Christian behavior, scandalous to a man raised as a foundling child by Jesuits. To wit:

Of course, she was a tyrant and a criminal, but when she ate, I saw in her a radiant life, a deep hunger, and an almost pious reflection on each moment. When she swallowed, her nostrils flared like those of a running horse, yet her hunger was sophisticated. The ladies I had served in the past knew how to hold salad forks and discuss the latest fashions, yet their palates were blind. Mabbot claimed each dish as Moses’s men claimed the land of milk and honey.

This dynamic, which Brown handles deftly (down to the biblical allusion), makes perfect sense. But otherwise, I think the narrative gets away from him. Rather than unfurl all his canvas and run before the wind, pushing the improbable and eccentric to the limit (as with, say, George McDonald Fraser’s Flashman series), Brown has unfortunately trimmed his sails. It’s as if he decided that his novel must be About Something.

Consequently, Wedgwood has to learn, gradually but surely, that Hannah Mabbot defies the moral certainties he’s held throughout his life, and that there’s more to her murderous escapades than meets the eye. He discovers that the Pendleton Trading Company (read: The East India Company) has beggared entire populations through the production and sale of opium, forced labor, and violent suppression of protest or competition. No argument, there, and hardly a surprise, but this theme belongs more to a serious novel like M. J. Carter’s Strangler Vine (reviewed December 14). Here, it requires a bulky backstory, as does why Mabbot hates opium trading–and the more I read, the less I believe it. Even more convoluted, Brown introduces a French antagonist to Mabbot named Laroche, whose futuristic ships seem like something out of Jules Verne.

If Cinnamon and Gunpowder’s a hodgepodge, its redeeming, dead-center feature is the food. Chef Wedgwood’s recipes are absolutely inspired, as are his adaptations to working in an ill-equipped, understocked pirate galley, not least of which is how he crushes nuts and spices with a cannonball. To me, a passionate cook, those parts of the novel are the most memorable, and it’s no wonder that Hannah Mabbot enjoys what her captive dishes out.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

William Avery believes in the East India Company, which rules most of that immense land in 1837, but he knows the company doesn’t believe in him. A lowly ensign in Calcutta, Avery has little chance of promotion, but maybe that’s just as well, since he can’t stand India, which he considers savage. He would as soon resign his position and return to England, but he has no prospects there, either, and no money to pay the fare.

General Post Office, Calcutta, 1833 (Courtesy Wikiwand).

His last chance to make a name for himself comes in poisonous form, to second James Blake on a secret mission deep up-country. Avery rightly suspects that he’s unlikely to survive, which may be his superiors’ intention. Moreover, he can’t stand Blake, an extremely unpleasant, older man who threw away a promising career with the company and adopted indigenous ways. But all that takes second place when Avery’s only friend is murdered and his name slandered as a drunken, lecherous, debt-ridden schemer. With barely time to grieve, Avery must take his journey to what he thinks will be oblivion.

This is where The Strangler Vine excels, as a story of adventure and political intrigue. Blake refuses to take Avery into his confidence, or, often, even to talk to him; whenever possible, Blake scouts on his own, which leaves Avery feeling wounded in pride, frustrated, and, reasonably, wondering what purpose he serves. It also creates tension, because the reader, kept in the dark like Avery, has no idea whom or what to trust. Gradually, though, the younger man observes more of the land and people, and you sense his mind stretching to accommodate the new:

The road was not yet as busy as it would become once the rains stopped for good, but it was already a full day’s entertainment in itself. There were frenzied ash-smeared fakirs who gamboled grotesquely and stuck their palms out for money; women wrapped in layers of cottons–saffron, pink, blue–with babes on their hips and dull brass bracelets tinkling; small insolent boys chewing sugarcane. There were jugglers with families of monkeys in their turbans; wealthy Sikhs in yellow silk waistcoats with enormous beards and huge dastars [headgear], leading columns of camels and carts; wedding parties in red and silver, with painted elephants, encircled by the scent of jasmine; and carts of dull-eyed, ragged indentured servants.

More profoundly, Avery realizes that Blake, though stubbornly difficult, has put his keen observational and linguistic skills to serve a moral code, and that the older man has much to teach. Avery struggles mightily with the challenges to his certainty. Even so, he comes to similar conclusions: that the company has betrayed English ideals in pursuit of profit, and that whatever benefits it has brought have dearly cost the populace. Most particularly, the company has perpetuated myths about violent bandits to excuse military operations that expand the area under its control. Consequently, the company has created a monster that only it can slay, a corruption that will doom it in the long run (as would, in fact, happen twenty years later).

What an absorbing, provocative tale this is, remarkably well told for a first novel, and vivid in attitudes and scenery. I like Carter’s characterizations of Avery and Blake–the callow traditionalist versus the jaded radical–and many people they meet have their own complexities. I question, though, how quickly Avery loses any thought of his late friend, much maligned, only to have the death wrapped up just as quickly at the end. Further, Blake’s absolute silence about every conceivable detail seems too convenient. True, he doesn’t trust Avery’s judgment, but Blake carries this so far as to make me think it’s an authorial ploy to keep the reader guessing, a drawback of using a first-person narrative. Finally, since Avery is a crack shot, his sole visible talent, you can be sure that will come into play, which occasionally tips off where the narrative will go.

That said, The Strangler Vine has much going for it, not least its resonance with current issues. The East India Company, as Carter shows, provides an early example of corporate governance and the abuses that entails. Substitute terrorist for bandit, and the novel also offers a nineteenth-century take on an up-to-the-minute controversy. Did bandits exist in India? Yes. Were they as widespread and dangerous as the company claimed, and did their presence justify its policies? Those are the questions, then and now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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Damyanti Biswas is an author, blogger, animal-lover, spiritualist. Her work is represented by Ed Wilson from the Johnson & Alcock agency. When not pottering about with her plants or her aquariums, you can find her nose deep in a book, or baking up a storm.